Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

Deciding to design workshops about building positive relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people was easy. A friend and I were always talking about our two cultures – hers Aboriginal and mine a mix of eastern and western – and people kept asking questions until we realised we need to share what we’ve learned together. We knew there were lots of other workshops out there but we also knew we wanted to take a different approach. We wanted to show people how we have built shared understanding.

But why would I have an interest in this when I’m not Aboriginal myself? Why would I even be involved? What would I have to contribute? Why does it matter to me? Why is it important enough to me to spend so much time on it?

Why am I trying to make a difference? Because I can’t not try to make a difference. Every part of my being knows that the experience of many Aboriginal people in Australia is not okay. Since I was nine years old I have had amazing Aboriginal friends who have enriched my life more than I can say, and over that time it has broken my heart to see how Aboriginal people experience casual racism and discrimination in their day to day lives from childhood onwards and that is not okay. When people spoke to my Iranian Dad as if he was stupid just because he had a foreign accent, it cut me deeply I was affected for life. When I have seen people, especially children, treated as “less than”, I have seen them become smaller and their world became smaller. I knew that something was deeply wrong. I cannot accept a world that makes children feel small.

I believe there is a better way forward. I believe taking a positive approach, starting with what we all have in common and how we see ourselves is a way to help us all to see the experience of others. I believe all people have the ability to celebrate others and bring out the best in everyone. I believe the greatest gift we can give a person is understanding, acceptance and respect. To say “I see you and I value you”.

I believe we get more from life when we connect with others and I believe this starts with understanding ourselves.  So we decided to create workshops that give people a look into the world that I’ve been lucky enough to experience a part of. To talk about the wonderful things that I have learnt through my friendships and the things that have enriched my life.

Will this change the world? Probably not. But if I can take one step each day to contribute even a little bit to building shared understanding between and respect for Aboriginal people, then by this time next year I’ll have taken 365 steps towards building common ground.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

Years ago, a very good friend of mine confided to me that for span of several years, while her children were very young, she was a cow. Not a female person unfortunately inclined to behave badly to others, but an actual cow.

I was in my early twenties at the time and generally clueless when it came to relationships between mothers and their very young children. My relationship with my own mother was strained, at best, and I didn’t yet have children of my own. So, while this revelation of my friend’s was remarkable enough to be remembered when so very many others were lost, at the time that she said it, I didn’t know what she meant. At least, I was aware that it didn’t really have to do with breastfeeding (maybe a little bit, at one time?) but it’s less obvious implications were beyond the reach of my capacity to understand – shadowy things, less substantial than smoke and just as difficult to grasp.

I do get it now. I have had very young children and there were days when I, too, was a cow. Probably both sorts at once. I was a source of food, a propagator of another generation of my kind, a creature enslaved to a mundane daily ritual involving milk, nurturing and lots of walking; and when prevailing conditions were stormy, I turned my arse to the wind and rain and tried to keep the worst of the weather out of my face.

My children represent the best of my life. I love them dearly and nurturing them is my privilege. But at that time, I lost my higher functioning self, my last best version of myself, and became a cow for a while. As far as cows go, I think I did alright. I quite like cows actually. But I am forever grateful to those other mothers in my life whose care and conversation – whose presence in my kitchen on windy, rainy days – helped me to re-integrate my soft-eyed cow with a newer alternative version of thinking, mostly-human woman.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

Describe the beach. I left my shoes under that tree that is no longer there. I left that tree behind a long time ago and walked off barefoot, never looked back and now, looking out this window, looking back, the shore is so far away. The window is round and a gull soars past and I can’t see which way is back because all around me is sea, sea, sea. So tranquil.

Describe the beach, describe the beach.

I waited.

The sun slanted into the kitchen, it was late afternoon and that old radio was on, before you swiped it off the shelf just like that, you said ‘Enough of those voices, that infernal music, why can’t we all just be QUIET?’

Describe the beach describe the beach describe the beach.

By the time we got there our footprints were long gone and the sand was strewn with starfish. There must have been hundreds of them, all beached, all grey. Perhaps in the water, before, they were luminous, but now they were such a dull grey, like the sand, the sky, all such a dull grey, the only light emanating from behind the waves, the Indian ocean glowing jade green under winter’s white foam. Occasionally one of their legs moved, twitched a last flick of life before stillness, the absenting of life, the last star going out before everything turns to dust.

Describe the beach. Long, quiet, ten minutes end to end. One step before the next, on the liminal shore.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

She looked at me like she knew me already. She didn’t ask questions but she told me her stories openly and freely.  We sat in her clean, sparsely-decorated, empty home. On the mantelpiece sat five shells.  One shell for each of her miscarriages.  Each was vastly different, as each loss had been.  There was a jagged white one – the first, she told me – a small blue one, another white shell, a red-tinged one and a purple one.  I imagined her walking along the beach, tears in her eyes, and a hole deep inside as she collected rocks and shells, feeling them between her fingers over and over before pocketing the right one.  Five sad trophies side by side in a lonely house. “I couldn’t do it to him anymore,” she said of her absent husband “I couldn’t do it to myself anymore.”

I sat in silence on the other side of the room. My story was different to hers, and one I could not tell her; one she could not hear.  I did not pick out a shell, or any other rare treasure from the sea after my abortion. I didn’t see the foetus as a baby, as a life. Pregnancy was a condition I was desperate to be cured of. I needed distance between me and him and I aborted the thing we made that would have glued us together for the rest of our lives. It was not sad, and there was no remorse. It was clean. It was clinical. I signed some paperwork and changed into a paper gown and put my legs in stirrups. And when I woke up they fed me miniature sandwiches and apple juice.  A friend drove me home where I slept some more and in the morning I packed one suitcase and took the train to the airport. I couldn’t handle looking into his eyes one final time, nor being held hostage by his mood swings and inexplicable rage. On the bench at home, if he looked, he would find my note: “You already know why.” If he didn’t see it coming then he’d never understand the leaving; he didn’t deserve the explanation he couldn’t understand.

“Do you think you’ll have children one day?” She asked me hopefully, a sad smile on her face. I looked at her collection of shells before I met her eyes “I’m not sure.” I shrugged gently.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

Once upon a time there was a woman who became a mother. It didn’t happen overnight. Obviously. It started over night but then took 9 months to come to fruition. After nine months she had a round wrinkly little thing that could do nothing but required everything. And the mother wrung the best bits out of the grey world that surrounded her to try and grow and stretch and toughen up this little beast. The sky where they lived was never visible. It was always cloaked in a dirty grimy blanket of grey, but she would leave the kid to roll around in the tiny outdoor space they had, to soak up whatever withered traces of sunshine it could.

Every day, she would strap the child to her front and hug it to her chest like a hot water bottle. They would walk through narrow industrial streets, with gritty gutters and wrappers collecting in the corners and alleys. They would walk to the baby girl’s childcare centre, which was full of bright light and primary colours. Then the mother would go and spend hours cutting carrots into items of intricate garnish for high end catering events.

One day, stepping across the threshold from the coarse and grinding city, into the smooth and shiny reflections and colour of the child care centre, the mother was hit by the contrast in a way she had never experienced before. She couldn’t leave the girl there, where there was no chance of skinned knees from angry gravel or scratches from misjudging a rough corner.

Because of that, she decided to take her child with her, back out into the grey, and try to find the real colour and softness and grit and texture that she knew was out there somewhere in the world. They started small. One bean, sitting in some rubbishy dirt in a mug on their kitchen counter, sent up two small leaves at the top of a tender stalk.

And, because of that, a little colour started to leach into their life. And the child soaked it up. They collected snippets of coloured wool and painted patches of garish wall. They grew tall sunflowers with awkwardly heavy heads and mixed colours that were against the rules. The child began to speak, and began to point out the snatches of colour that might otherwise have disappeared into the overwhelming grey of the sky and heavy cogs of the growling industrial city where they lived.

Until finally, the child had absorbed all that there was to provide light and life in that city. She had grown from a round, wobbly small thing, into an almost adult. What colour they could collect from they streets around their little flat, she had harvested, accumulated, carried in and arranged on the shelves and on the walls. And it was time for her to go. There was nothing left for her to feed and grow from. When she left her mother, and left the city, the colour and the variety and the possibilities of the rest of the world swallowed her up. Occasionally notes and pictures find their way back to her mother, little snippets of the countries she had worked her way through or the people she had met. Biology students in Guatemala, theatre directors in New York, orangutan rehabilitators in Borneo.

Her mother tried to be glad for the colour and life her daughter was moving through, but all she thought was “Oh my god I miss you”.